How a Gaming App Achieved 10x ROAS with ClicksFlyer

"We're going to shut down paid acquisition."

That's what the CEO of PuzzleQuest Studio told me during our first call. They'd spent eighteen months trying to scale their puzzle game profitably. Every attempt failed. Their ROAS was stuck at 1.5x—which meant they were barely breaking even after accounting for platform fees and overhead.

"Every dollar we spend on UA, we basically get a dollar back. What's the point?"

Six months later, that same CEO called me with a different problem: "We can't spend money fast enough. How do we scale faster?"

Their ROAS had hit 10x. Not a typo. Ten times return on ad spend. And they'd 4x'd their monthly budget while improving efficiency.

Here's what we discovered together—and why everything they thought they knew about their audience was wrong.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Admit

When we audited their existing campaigns, the problems were obvious—but the team had been staring at them so long they'd become invisible:

• $2.50 CPI on a game where median LTV was $3.80. After platform fees, there was nothing left.
• 12% Day-7 retention. For every 100 users they acquired, only 12 were still playing after a week. The rest were gone.
• Post-ATT chaos. Their attribution was so broken they couldn't tell which campaigns actually worked.
• Creative exhaustion. They'd been running variations of the same three concepts for eight months. Users had seen them all.

But the real problem was deeper: they were targeting the wrong people entirely.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

PuzzleQuest assumed their audience was 18-34 year olds. That's who plays casual games, right? That's who the creative was designed for. That's who they targeted in every campaign.

So we ran an audience analysis. Let the data tell us who actually stuck around and spent money.

The results were embarrassing—for them, not us. Their highest-LTV users weren't 18-34. They were 35-54. By a factor of 3x.

For eighteen months, they'd been optimizing to acquire young users who installed, played for three days, and churned. Meanwhile, the older users they'd mostly ignored were completing levels, watching rewarded videos, making in-app purchases, and telling their friends.

We pivoted everything toward 35-54. New creative. New messaging. New targeting. Immediate impact.

The Creative Experiment That Shocked Everyone

Their existing ads were gameplay videos. Pretty standard for casual games: show someone solving puzzles, overlay some satisfying sounds, end with a download CTA.

We tested four different approaches:

• Playable ads: Let users actually try the puzzle mechanics before installing
• UGC-style testimonials: Real-feeling people talking about why they love the game
• Problem/solution narratives: "Bored in line? Here's what I do..."
• Satisfying completion compilations: The dopamine hit of watching puzzles get solved

Everyone on the team expected the testimonials to win. Authenticity, relatability, the usual marketing wisdom.

The playables crushed everything else. 2.5x higher conversion rate. Dramatically lower CPI. And—this was the surprise—significantly better retention because users who'd already experienced the mechanic knew what they were downloading.

The playable ad wasn't just an ad. It was a filter. It let users pre-qualify themselves.

The Bidding Shift That Felt Crazy (Until It Worked)

Here's where it got counterintuitive. We told them to pay more per install.

They thought we were insane. "We're already struggling with CPI. You want us to increase it?"

Yes. But optimize for LTV, not installs.

Instead of telling the platforms to find us cheap installs, we told them to find us users who were likely to become valuable over 30 days. The CPI went up—$3.20 instead of $2.50. But those users were worth $12 on average, not $3.80.

"The shift to LTV-based bidding felt wrong at first. We were paying more for fewer installs. But then we looked at revenue. ROAS jumped from 1.5x to 4x in the first month. We weren't buying cheaper users—we were buying better ones."

— Head of UA, PuzzleQuest Studio

The Geographic Insight Hidden in Plain Sight

Everyone was fighting over the US. Premium market, high LTV, brutal CPIs. We looked at the data differently: where could we get good LTV at reasonable prices?

Brazil: $0.55 CPI with LTV only 25% lower than the US. Net ROAS 40% higher.

Poland: Similar LTV to Western Europe at 60% lower acquisition cost.

Thailand: Incredible engagement metrics at a fraction of the cost.

We shifted 40% of budget to secondary markets. Volume increased. Efficiency improved. The math worked.

The Results That Made the CEO Change His Mind

Six months of systematic optimization:

• ROAS: From 1.5x to 10x. The campaigns that were "barely worth running" became their most profitable channel.
• CPI: From $2.50 to $0.85. Not by finding cheaper traffic—by getting dramatically better conversion rates.
• D7 retention: From 12% to 28%. Because we stopped acquiring users who never wanted to stay.
• Monthly installs: From 50K to 300K. Scale and efficiency improved together.
• Revenue: Up 500%. The reason any of this matters.

What This Story Actually Teaches

1. Your assumptions are probably wrong. They were certain about their audience. The data said otherwise. Let the data win.
2. Creative matters more than you think. One format—playables—changed everything. Test aggressively and follow what works.
3. Pay for value, not volume. Cheap installs are only cheap until you measure what they're worth. Expensive users who convert are actually cheap.
4. The whole world is your market. Stop competing for the same exhausted tier-1 audiences. The math often works better elsewhere.

PuzzleQuest didn't shut down paid acquisition. They made it their primary growth engine. The campaigns that seemed hopeless became their competitive advantage.

The difference wasn't magic. It was measurement, testing, and the willingness to discover they'd been wrong about almost everything.